After rare procedure, woman can hear her heart beat in another

Getting the calls

Griffin lives in Happy Valley, a town near Portland, Oregon. She was on the phone with her sister the afternoon of Jan. 29 when another call came in. It was a doctor from Stanford, who told her there was a heart-lung donor for her. Griffin and her husband, Jim, started to panic a bit, trying to pack and find a flight. “I thought I was going to lose my chance,” she said. Then she received another call to say she didn’t have to rush quite so fast. The organs would be waiting for her. The Griffins arrived at Stanford around midnight that day.

Karr, who lives in Berkeley, was diagnosed almost 20 years ago with right ventricular dysplasia, a genetic disease that causes a dangerously abnormal heart rhythm. Over time, it became difficult for her to walk down a hall at work without having to stop and rest, and impossible to walk her dog. Even so, she wasn’t very high on the transplant waiting list.

“My doctor told me I’d have to be hospitalized to move up — and if my deterioration was rapid, I might not get a heart in time,” she said. Then, on Jan. 30, she turned on her phone after coming out of a movie theater — something she didn’t always remember to do, she said — and it rang. It was a Stanford doctor: A possible heart donor had been found, he said, and someone would call back in four hours. She checked into Stanford Hospital the following day.

Her heart was an innocent bystander pushed out of its normal position 

During the Feb. 1 domino procedure, one surgical team removed the heart and lungs from the deceased donor, a second team implanted them in Griffin, and a third team implanted her heart in Karr. (Woo led the second team.)

Other Stanford Medicine physicians, including Michael Fowler, MD, director of the Heart Failure Program, and Gundeep Dhillon, MD, medical director of the Heart-Lung and Lung Transplantation Program, provided pre-transplant care to Griffin and Karr and are providing post-transplant care to them, as well.

“The extraordinary work of Dr. Woo and his team demonstrates the very best of an academic medical center — where our research informs the development of revolutionary treatments like the domino procedure, which we then use to save the lives of our patients,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean at Stanford Medicine.

 ‘I am optimistic’

Karr is making good progress toward recovery. She’s started participating in a cardiac rehabilitation class, and she’s hoping to be able to again to run a 10K, ride a mountain bike or even just jog. “I would be thrilled just to ride my bike up an incline without having to get off and push it,” she said. “When I think about my future, I am optimistic.”

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After rare procedure, woman can hear her heart beat in another